In this week’s Hemmings Six Degrees of Automotive Separation Challenge, we present the battle of A to Z, of East versus West, as we challenge you to link American Motors (USA! USA! USA!) to Zavod Imeni Likhachev. It’s like the 1980 Winter Olympics Miracle on Ice, but with cars and trucks, and with a common link between the two companies – in six connections or less, that is.

We can actually think of a couple ways to do this, so, of course, no answer is wrong.

The rules, as before, are simple: A connection consists of one company owning another, merging with another or sharing anotherâ€™s parts. Explain your connections, and as before, the point isnâ€™t necessarily to do it in the least number of connections, but to do it with style and with obscure connections. If you need examples, check out our previous Hemmings Six Degrees of Automotive Separation Challenges.

Here’s a more complicated one that I came up with, and I have to post it because I managed to include Facel Vega:

Zil used a straight-8 Buick engine in some of their cars in 1933, Buick was owned by GM, GM and Volvo did a joint venture with Volvo GM Heavy Trucks in the 1980s, Facel Vega used a Volvo engine in the Facel III, Facel Vegas used Chrysler engines, and Chrysler bought AMC.

@Justin-
What an amazing and perfectly convoluted path; this week’s Golden Water Pump award (air-cooled VW edition) is yours!

I’ll admit, my two paths are not nearly as clever. ZIL’s postwar limousines were basically Packards, and Packard provided a V-8 engine to AMC in the mid-1950s, before AMC could get theirs into production. My other path: ZIS/ZIL essentially copied International’s KB truck, and International for a brief period in the 1970s used AMC straight-sizes and V-8s.

Most of these Russian connections involve a lot of “based ons,” rather than actual use of parts, the exceptions being the prewar creatures like the GAZ-As, in which Ford had a substantial role. Although clever copies, the ZIS and ZIL limos used no real Packard parts or tooling, as autopsies of the cadavers show.

So lets try another romp at this:

ZIL was created by the deStalinification of ZIS, which derived from AMO (the actual 1920s Fiat clone). But the ZIS 150 truck was “based on” the IHC K series, as you say, Daniel. Ford used International diesel engines in their trucks, and also built not one but two, count ‘em, two Jeeps to essentially Willys patterns (GPW and the oft-forgotten M-38CDN)

Okay here goes:
ZIL made Limos for Soviet Bigwigs
The Soviet Union and the Third Reich were two of the Axis Powers in WWII
Adolph Hitler had design input into Dr. Porsche’s “Strength Through Joy” Mobile.
Porsche based their 928 design upon the AMC Pacer.

Okay, it’s a joke… Except for Porsche cribbing the Pacer styling for the 928 part :^)

Well ZIL made a licensed copy of the Ford AA truck. Ford supplied engines for various Jensens. Jensen of course built the bodies for the Austin Healey. Healey also worked with Nash on the Nash Healey. Nash eventually became a part of AMC.

The AA clone was a GAZ, was it not, built in Gorky? ZIL was a postwar evolution of the ZIS, built in Moscow. Of course, in a socialist country you could say that all motor vehicles were built by the same “company,” but that makes this whole exercise pretty trivial. Nice touch for invoking Jensen, though, but you can go straight to Jensen-Healey, it seems to me, and then back to Nash without bothering Austin.

Another ZIL/Pacer path is that Dick Teague was repsonisble for the design of the Packards which design were inherited/ripped off by ZIL, Teague joined AMC and his last work in design business was the Pacer